NEC 3550A Dual layer problems.

I have heard nothing but great reviews about NEC drives. That is why I have purchsed three. I have two in my computer now. THe first one I purchased I had to send it back and got my account refunding with newegg.com because of a UPS issue but decide to order again. Everything was fine. THen I purchase the second one and thought there was something wrong but realized that it was not in slave. So I fixed that and both was functioning until last night when my cd-r burns all of sudden would fail a 7%. Don't know what too do. This is after I have burned over 20 cd-r disk of my large album collection and I never had a problem all cd-r's would burn in less than 2:40 minutes and this is on Imation media disks.

Yes I know that this is cheap media but as I have stated before everything has burned and I have had great playback with no skips, hissing or distortion in sound.

My second drive is working but I only used it after my first drive which is master and is D:drive stopped writing(burning)properly. My first NEC drive still can read disk such as dvd's and cds including the recordable and rewritables media but just fails to write onto disk after completing 7 percent. Always stops at 7 percent.

So since I have had so many issues with this drive I don't know if I should consider another drive manufactuer such as ASUS, BenQ or Liteon. I have never seen a drive getting better reviews then NEC 3550A on newegg.com except for some samsung drives.

Could it be that I need to update my firmware of my NEC 3550A 1.05 drive to a more recent one? I just want a drive that I know I can burn and read media thousands of times before I have to replace it. A drive that can read and write to even cheap media and still playback flawlessly in many devices including PS2 (this is the reasoning for me chosing the NEC drive).Meaning something that I can own for more than 2 years and be completely happy with.

Any suggestions guys?